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French Negative Concord and Discord: An Experimental Investigation of Contextual and Prosodic Disambiguation Viviane D´eprez, Jeremy Yeaton 1 April 2016 *A version of this paper appeared in Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 14 with minor edits. Abstract Recent evidence that DN readings can arise in solid NC languages far more than previously thought (Dprez & al. 2015, D´eprez et al 2013, D´eprez 2014) underscore the theoretical importance of investigating the factors that govern the emergence of these interpretations to deepen our understanding of the cross-linguistic nature of Negative Concord constructions. Although context and prosody are oft cited influencing factors, no study has yet focused on investigating their effects on the interpretation of French NC constructions. To address this current gap, this paper investigates the roles of context and prosody in the disambiguation of simple French transitive sentences with two NCIs like personne and rien experimentally. French speakers were recorded reading transitive sentences containing NCIs, in subject and object positions, embedded in disambiguating NC or DN eliciting contexts. Target sentences were followed with a verification statement judged as T/F whose responses were statistically analyzed as matching or not. Target sentences with context-matching interpretations were extracted using Praat and analyzed using ProsodyPro (Xu, 2013). Sentence contour, average pitch and F0 peak value on NCIs were obtained and compared across conditions. Our results provide solid evidence that in French, NC and DN interpretations are prosodically distinguished, with a higher pitch accent on the object NCI in DN for a majority of speakers. This is argued to support a prosodic/structural distinction in NCI, with prosodically prominent NCI analyzed as Negative Quantifiers, and a polyadic resumptive analysis of the interpretation of NC sequences (De Swart et al. 2002, De Swart 2010, D´eprez 1997, 2000, 2011).

1

Introduction

French, sequences of potentially negative expressions like personne and rien, referred to here as Negative Concord Items (NCI) (Watanabe 2004)1 , can have two possible interpretations; a sentence like (1a) can have a Negative Concord (NC) reading as in (1b) or a Double Negation (DN) or negative discord reading as in (1c), in which negations cancel each other out to produce a positive reading. (1) a. Personne ne dit rien b. Nobody says anything = Everyone is silent = NC c. Nobody says nothing = Everybody talks = DN On a par with other Romance languages, French is generally regarded as a concord language (Zeijlstra 2004, De Swart 2002). As is known, however, double negation readings of NCI sequences are possible and not uncommon (D´eprez 2000, Corblin & Tovena 2003). Still quite unexplored, however, are the different factors that govern the choice between NC and DN interpretations for French speakers. The question of whether NC is a default reading in French as well as the influence of the morpho-syntactic nature of NCI, and their 1 The expressions that participate in negative concord dependencies are also often referred to as n-words. We chose to avoid this term here to avoid any unpleasant connotation.

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structural position on this choice was examined in previous experimental work (D´eprez et al 2013, D´eprez 2014). Processing considerations influencing interpretation are discussed in Corblin (2006). The present study focuses on the role of context, and especially of prosody on the choice of NC/DN interpretation in standard French. Quite a few authors have noted the importance of prosody in influencing the interpretation of French NCI sequences (Corblin & Tovena 2003, Corblin et al 2014) but up to now, there has been no experimental investigation of how and to what extent NC and DN could be prosodically distinguished. Here we report the result of a production experiment designed to start answering this question.

2

Theoretical Background

A popular theoretical stand in generative approaches to Negative Concord has been to consider that there is a macro-parameter that divides NC languages from DN languages (Zanuttini (1991), Haegeman (1995), Zeijlstra (2004 & following). In main European languages, the partition would by and large run along the Romance vs Germanic divide, though with noted exceptions. The predictions of such views are that no real NC/DN ambiguities should be observed in languages, and hence, the emergence of NC in DN languages or DN in NC languages is often cast as marked or anomalous and, as such, not considered as part of what the grammars allow. There have been essentially 3 families of theoretical accounts of the phenomenon of Negative Concord, which differ according to the status given to NCIs. In the first type of account, NCI are considered to be non-negative expressions, of either existential or universal nature, and the single negation reading of concord comes from a single sentential negation operator that is overt (Giannakidou 2000) or covert (Zeijstra 2004). Here, the predictions are that DN readings in sequences of NCI should be no more available than with sequences of negative polarity items like anything or anyone. In the second type of account, NCI are negative expressions and concord readings are obtained through a semantic process of Resumptive Quantification, a subtype of polyadic quantification (May 1990, De Swart et al. 2002, D´eprez 1997, D´eprez 2000). Here, in contrast, sequences of NCI are predicted to be ambiguous and can in principle lead to either NC or DN readings, depending on whether they are interpreted under scopal interaction or resumptive quantification. Left unaccounted on this view, however, is how this choice operates and thus, how languages could differ in their NC/DN distribution. Finally, in a third type of approach, NCI are taken to be ambiguous expressions that are sometimes negative, sometimes not. The ambiguity has been regarded as lexical by some researchers (Herburger 2001) and as structural by others, shaped by the internal syntax of NCIs (D´eprez 2000). D´eprez (2011) argued that structural considerations affect the interpretability of the negative features of NCIs both within the DP and in the sentence in which they occur. Very briefly, negative features become interpretable at phase edge, but how they get to these edges, and how phases are established in a language can be subject to variation. The predictions of this approach is that NC and DN readings are subject to morpho-syntactic and structural conditions that can vary both language-internally and cross-linguistically, though the principles of negative interpretability remain unchanged.

3

Experimental Background

A previous experimental study on French negative dependencies used a picture to meaning matching choice task without verbal contexts to probe NC and DN interpretations (D´eprez et al 2013, D´eprez 2014, D´eprez et al 2015). Contrasting with the expectations fostered by much of the literature on French, the results showed no solid preference for NC. French speakers preferred NC only slightly but not significantly in NCI sequences with pronominal expressions like personne and rien (noted Pro. in fig. ??), but significantly preferred DN readings when NCI sequence featured full DP expressions like aucun enfant (no child) (noted DP in fig. 3) in subject positions, although NC readings were not excluded in these cases either. The graph in fig. 3 sums up the central results of this first experimental investigation. We see that the choice of NC or DN is almost equivalent when the subject is a pronominal NCI like personne: NC at 53% and DN at 46%. So these structures are clearly ambiguous. But when the NCI is a full DP like aucun enfant in subject position, then the DN readings are significantly preferred at 66%, (p < 0.001). These results confirm that morpho-syntactic and structural factors can strongly influence the NC/DN interpretation choice within a single language. Yet since structures with pronominal NCI were shown to be ambiguous between NC and DN readings, further factors need to be considered for these particular 2

Figure 1: Morphosyntactic factors influencing NC vs DN readings. cases, and more specifically, context and prosody. Concerning the influence of context on interpretation, it has been quite generally assumed that in order to be felicitous, a DN sentence requires a special context. Yet the specific nature of this context is not always made clear. Many have noted that the contradiction of a previous negation facilitated these readings. More specifically, as proposed in Puskas (2012), DN sentences are said to felicitous when they negate a discourse old negation with a discourse new negation2 . This context type, however, is said to facilitate DN readings in all types of languages, independently of whether or not they have been regarded as NC or DN languages. In French, however, contexts of this type are not necessary to elicit a potential DN reading for NCI sequences, even if, of course, they remain possible (Corblin and Tovena 2003, D´eprez 2000). So a sentence like ?? can be understood with a DN reading. Assume a context where a restaurant bill is split in a group and everyone must contribute. (2) Tout le monde a bien r`egl´e sa part? Oui en effet, personne n’a rien pay´e. Did everyone pay their part? Yes, indeed. Nobody paid nothing. Here, the context facilitates DN because the positive meaning of the double negation sentence (everyone paid something) is the expected outcome. Since we were interested specifically in how this ambiguity is resolved in French, and whether DN readings can be elicited in contexts that do not feature a contradiction, these are the type of context that were used in our design. The literature reveals some previous experimental research on NC/DN prosody, though at this point, none that we are aware of for French. Prosody has first been investigated for Afrikaans in a production study by Huddlestone (2010), who found NC & DN to be distinguished. A similar study on Dutch by Fonville (2013) did not produce such clear results. It is notable, however, that in the experimental design of both of these production experiments, the interpretation of the actual target sentences was presupposed to match the one the context intended to facilitate. As there was no meaning verification test, however, it is ultimately unclear what interpretation the speakers really had. Some of the observed fluctuation may well result from this design problem, so that in the end, claims of a prosodic differentiation or lack thereof are difficult to evaluate. Other prosodic studies on Catalan (Espinal et al.2011, Espinal et al. 2016), found a clear NC/DN distinction. This study, however, looked at the meaning of single NCI in answers to negative questions, which 2 That denial of a previous negation is not always necessary for DN even for supposed DN languages like English is shown by examples like (i), said by a resolute mother determined to protect her child:

(i) There is nothing I would not do for my child. (American Crime, commercial for an ABC TV show). In this example, DN is used to strengthen an affirmation.

3

proved to be ambiguous in Catalan, but are not felt to be so in French, where they have been observed to systematically lead to a DN interpretation (Corblin and Tovena, 2003). In view of our previous experimental results and these preceding prosody studies, the study reported here sought to answer the following research questions:

4

Research Questions 1. Does context succeed in influencing/determining NC/DN interpretation in French? 2. What is the role of prosody? Does French manifest a particular mapping between prosody and interpretation in NCI sequences? If so which one?

5

Experimental Design

To investigate these questions, we designed a production experiment. Participants were asked to read simple ambiguous transitive sentences in context and were recorded. The test sentences all followed the form [personne ne Verb rien PP], and were embedded in short contexts facilitating a NC or DN interpretation as illustrated in 4 below. Importantly, our DN facilitating contexts did not contain negative propositions, which have been argued to facilitate DN in all languages, even strict NC ones (Puskas 2012), but rather were simple statements that described situations compatible with a DN reading for our targets. Following the reading, subjects were presented with a verification statement that served to check whether participant interpretation indeed matched the one intended by the context. For example, respective contexts were as in 4 for the ambiguous target sentence in 3: (3) personne ne boit rien dans les soir´ees (Nobody drinks anything/ nothing at parties) (4) a. NC Context

Dans notre famille, on est tous allergique a` l’alcool: In our family one is all allergic to alcohol In our family, we are all allergic to alcohol: personne ne boit rien dans les soir´ees Nobody null.Neg drink object.NCI in the parties Nobody drinks anything at parties b. DN Context

For both 4a and 4b above, the verification statement was as in 5 below: (5) Ils ne boivent pas d’alcool. 3p.Pl null.Neg drink Neg alcohol They don’t drink alcohol In the NC context presented in 4a, the interpretation intended would yield a response of True to the verification statement: since everyone is allergic to alcohol, no person in the family drinks any alcohol, i.e.: no alcohol is consumed, therefore they dont drink alcohol would be true. By contrast, 5 would be false following the DN eliciting context in 4b. Since the consumption of alcohol among the youth has reached frightening levels, one understands that at parties, no youth fails to drink, therefore everyone is drinking. Hence the verification statement, they dont drink alcohol would be false. There were 5 categories of stimuli, each with 8 items per category: 1. Ambiguous criticals in DN contexts, as in 4a above 2. Ambiguous criticals in NC contexts, as in 4b above 3. Single negation controls with a single NCI in subject position: Personne ne boit ¸ca (nobody drinks this) 4. Single negation controls with an NCI in object position: Les gens ne boivent rien (People drink nothing) 5. Fillers Les enfants boivent du jus (Children drink juice). The verification statements were balanced 4T/4F within each category. With 40 items per participant and 28 participants, 1120 total responses were collected. In order to avoid ordering effects, the items were pseudorandomized in blocks. Each block featured one item per category, randomized within the block, and the blocks were appended one after the other also in random order such that every participant saw all 40 items. In order to control for prosodic factors, the same number of syllables was used in each of the target sentences. Two syllables for the subject, one syllable for the verb, and one syllable for the object. In order to avoid having the sentence boundary tone fall on the object NCI, each sentence was concluded by a prepositional phrase of at least two syllables. In addition, the same 8 monosyllabic verbs, of comparable frequency, were used in each category.

6

Participants and Procedure

28 native French speakers (18F, 10M, age 18-45), most students at the University of Lyon were recorded at the L2C2 Bron, France on a Asus Orion PRO gaming headset with a noise filtering microphone. Participants were asked to read contexts and targets first silently, and then aloud, as if telling a story to a child. The recording was self-paced. After they finished recording, participants answered the verification question T/F. Participants were first presented with two practice items and the total experimental time took at most 20 minutes.

7

Analysis

Two main analyses were conducted: contextual interpretation and acoustic/prosodic. For the contextual interpretation analysis, T/F responses were coded as +/− context matching, as well as NC/DN. For the acoustic/ prosodic analysis, the critical sentences (personne ne [verb] rien [PP]) were excised from context using Audacity 2.0.6 and time aligned, matching phonemes and syllables to waveform in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2015) using EasyAlign (J.-Ph. Goldman, 2011). A second Praat script called ProsodyPro (Xu, 2013) was used to extract F0 values.

5

8 8.1

Results Context Influence

Figure 2: Matching responses in Controls and Critical items. In control contexts, interpretations correctly matching the context (NC match = NC interpretation in NC context, DN match = DN interpretation in DN contexts) were provided at 96.21%, from which it can be safely concluded that the task was well understood by the participants. For critical items, overall interpretation matched context at almost 80%, though a bit more in NC context (87%) and a bit less in DN contexts (72%). This clearly shows that context was successful in determining interpretation and is thus a strong factor that influences the NC/DN choice in French.

Figure 3: Matching and non-matching responses per participants. When the contexts results are examined by participant, it can be seen that NCI sequences were not equally ambiguous for all participants; some (7/28) strongly favored NC readings in both NC [DESCR] and DN contexts (= NC mismatch [DESCR]), and 1/28 strongly favored DN readings in all DN ([DESCR]) and NC contexts (=DN mismatch [DESCR]). But for the majority of participants (20/28), sequences of NCIs items are clearly ambiguous: they favor NC interpretations in NC contexts and DN interpretations in DN 6

contexts for the same sentences. Our prosodic analysis was restricted to these 20 participants and their 278 matching items (138 DN, 140 NC). Hence the context verification control in our experiment allowed us to confirm the ambiguity, and it also allowed us to filter out from the prosodic analysis the speakers and productions that did not have the intended meaning: participants and items mismatching the intended meanings were removed from further analysis to ensure that the productions we looked at clearly had the meaning we were interested in.

8.2

Acoustic Analysis

From the 278 recordings that were kept for analysis after meaning verification, we excised our disambiguated target sentence using the open source free audio editor software Audacity.

Figure 4: Sample f0 contours for the same sentence in DN and NC contexts. Before we turn to the results of our acoustic analysis, let us first look at a sample F0 contour produced by Praat. Note the difference seen in these contours between the realization of rien in the DN reading as opposed to the NC reading. The DN reading here has a higher F0 peak on this item than the NC one. For each syllable in the sentence, ProsodyPro (Xu 2013) was used to extract 10 time-normalized F0 values. The time-normalized values helped give an idea of how pitch was changing over the course of the syllable as opposed to over the course of time. Thus, instead of each segment having the same period of time (e.g.: 0.1 seconds), each segment represented 0.1 syllables. These ten values were then aligned by syllable across all 8 utterances in a given condition for a given participant. They were then averaged together to create an average contour for a participant in a given condition. These participant contours were, in turn, further averaged together to give an idea for the overall behavior in a condition. These were weighted by number of utterances used, since we only used context-matched recordings, and plotted to see the overall F0 shape of the speakers in a given condition. Figure 8.2 shows the average of the de-meaned F0 values for all DN matching and all NC matching items

7

Figure 5: De-meaned averaged contour by condition. respectively. It can be noted that pitch is higher and rises and falls more sharply on the object rien in the DN condition as compared to the NC condition. The difference in the average pitch of rien in the DN and NC condition for all subjects combined is significant at the p¡0.05 level. The peak F0 values for the NCI rien for all of the participants in the two conditions (DN=16.750Hz vs NC=6.754Hz) is also significantly different (p¡0.05). This is illustrated in fig. 8.2 both quantitatively on the right and graphically on the left.

Figure 6: Peak distinction on rien. In addition to the peak values, the difference between the peak value on rien and the lowest pitch of the following syllable, which represents the pitch drop after rien was also significant between conditions, as can be seen below in figure 8.2. The bar graph on the right represents the average pitch difference between the highest peak on rien and the lowest pitch on the following syllable (=pitch drop) greater for DN than for NC which is graphically represented on the left. The average F0 contours of all of the participants were then compared and two main patterns were found. The first and less common pattern (4 participants), shown below in Figure 8, is characterized by a higher peak value on the second syllable of the subject NCI personne in the DN condition, with little difference on the object NCI. This pattern corresponds to the one suggested in Corblin et als (2003) as typical for DN readings. For Corblin et al, emphasis on the subject NCI is what is assumed to be distinctive for DN. It is

8

Figure 7: Pitch drop after rien interesting to note that this pattern, although indeed represented in our data, turned out to be used by only a small minority of our participants.

Figure 8: Subject NCI emphasis, DN pattern The other pattern, which was exhibited by 14 of our participants, featured no discernible difference on the first NCI (personne) but a much higher peak value on second NCI (rien) in the DN condition. Two of our participants did not conform to either of these main patterns. Neither did they have a common pattern with one another.

9

Discussion

The acoustic measures described above clearly indicate that speakers make a distinction in production between the NC and DN readings. However, these measures do not yet constitute a prosodic analysis of this distinction, since a prosodic analysis is based on differences that can be perceived by speakers. We think, however, that the acoustic differences uncovered in this experiment are indeed indicative of a prosodic difference and we suggest that the NC and DN readings are characterized by a phrasing difference as well as by a difference in tone. For NC, we suggest, the prosodic analysis, given in 1 below, where personne forms 9

Figure 9: Object NCI emphasis, DN pattern its own accentual phrase, with a low pitch accent on the first syllable, and a high boundary tone marking the subject accentual phrase on the second syllable. The verb and the NCI object rien are then phrased together with a low pitch accent on the V and a high boundary tone on rien marking the VP accentual right edge phrase boundary. Finally, the prepositional phrase closes the sentence with a phrase final low boundary tone. NC: Focus on personne; rien is phrased as part of VP. L∗ (([DP Per

H-

L∗

sonne]AP )

([VP ne Verb

Hrien]AP )

L% ...([PP ...PP...]AP )IP )

For the DN reading in contrast, we suggest that rien forms its own accentual phrase, separate from that of the verb, which is possibly de-phrased (F´ery 2001) or phrased along with the subject (Avanzi et al. 2014). Furthermore, because rien is an accentual phrase by itself, it carries a Low+High or rising boundary tone. DN: Focus on personne; V is dephrased (C.F´ery 2001); focus on rien which forms its own phonological phrase. L∗ (([DP Per

H-

L∗

LH-

sonne]AP )

ne Verb

([DP rien]AP )

L% ...([PP ...PP...]AP )IP )

Following F´ery (2001), we suggest that this phrasing indicates that in DN, the second NCI is under focus, which is here manifested by an increased F0 peak and followed by a more abrupt fall on the next syllable, which could mark the end of the rien phrase. Support for this analysis is provided by the Prosograms (Mertens, to appear) we obtained for our target sentences, of which a representative sample contrasting realization of the DN reading (top) and the NC reading (bottom) of a particular speaker is provided in fig. 10. Prosogram, designed by Piet Mertens, is a software for the semi-automatic transcription of prosody. It takes a time aligned phonetic annotation (here delivered by Praat) and outputs a representation that is an estimation of the pitch contour that can be perceived by an average listener. This representation is a stylization of the F0 curve of vowel nuclei, which aims at the reconstruction of the perceived pitch contour, based on a psycho-acoustic model of tonal perception. In the sample provided in Figure 8, we see the difference between the stylized perceived contour of the DN and NC production of the target sentence personne naime rien. Two facts are notable in these representations. First note that the DN clearly has a higher tone on rien than the NC one. As you can see 10

Figure 10: Sample contrastive prosograms the thick bar is set at 150Hz in both diagrams. In DN, the tone on rien reaches the bar, while in NC, in contrast, it remains clearly below. Furthermore, for DN, the representation shows a Low-High tone on the monosyllabic rien, which we take to be representative of rien forming a phrase by itself. In contrast we see a flatter and lower high tone on rien in the NC reading. This is a distinction that matches our proposed prosodic analysis and suggests that the difference is indeed perceivable by an average French speaker.

10

Conclusions

First, our results confirm that both the NC and the DN readings are available for most French speakers, and that this ambiguity is not marginal. These results do not quite fit a NC/DN cross-linguistic parametric divide since, on such a view, French would be unclassifiable. Hence, an empirically correct account of French negative dependencies requires moving away from a macro-parametric divide. We have also seen that context quite generally succeeds in influencing the interpretation, although not equally for all speakers. At this point, an interesting question remains as to whether this speaker distinction reflects a distinction in their grammars or in their capacities to compute or process ambiguities. Finally, we have shown that, in production, the NC and DN interpretations are acoustically distinguished by a statistically significant higher F0 peak on the second NCI, and a steeper fall after it in the DN reading. We have further proposed that this acoustic difference signals a prosodic difference in phrasing and in tone. We argued that in DN, but not in NC, the second NCI can form its own prosodic phrase independent from the VP and bear a Low-High boundary tone. We would like to further suggest that, possibly, the two prosodic phrasing for NC and DN correspond to two distinct syntactic structures; One for NC, where the NCI remains or reconstructs inside the VP, so that its negative features are not interpretable on D´eprez (2011)s feature interpretability condition, which proposes that negative features are interpretable only when they occur at phase edges (DP,vP,CP); and the other for DN where, under focus, rien is interpreted at vP edge, so that its negative feature can be interpreted at the sentential and thus, at the propositional level.